Inspiration for the cartoon above arrived one day after a customer voiced a concern we hear from time to time, generally from folks recently returned from time abroad. Still basking in the glow of leisurely hours passed in a San Sebastián wine bar or on the terrace of some chic resto on the Cote d’Azur, and eager to keep the vibe alive, they pop into the Wine Corner in search of wine of the region. The concern? What sent them over the moon there, doesn’t have quite the same magic when sipped here. Why is that, exactly?
We’ll hear that it must be because the French — Spanish, Italians, etc. — keep the best for themselves, or because wine destined for export is full of sulfites (In Portofino I drank red wine all night long and never got a headache!) But its far more likely this is simply a case of what we’ve come to refer to as winestalgia: a condition whose symptoms involve the fond recollection of happy times spent in marvelous places with awfully nice people around bottles of wine that seemed better than anything we’d tasted before and that nothing consumed stateside can equal.
Sufferers from this malady — and who hasn’t had a touch of it now and then? — should know that it’s not the wine, per se, that’s letting them down. Rather, it’s a failure to conceive the degree to which the pleasure we derive from wine is context-dependent, and that recreating the magic of that original experience requires more than pulling the right cork.
You’d have also to conjure up the view of the fountain from the piazza at dusk, the charm of the hostess, the little plates that seemed never to stop coming, the sizzling conversation; in short, a whole world at a given, delightful moment.
We don’t suggest you attempt to free yourself entirely from the grip of winestalgia; its symptoms have their pleasanter aspects, after all. A better approach would be to overwrite a few of those memories of places far away with a host of new ones, made right at home, in our own dining rooms, back porches and backyards, where memorable evenings of good food, winsome wines and stimulating convo are both easy to create and easy to replicate.
I’m afraid no one ever told the couple in the ‘toon any of this, poor fellas. Maybe they need a new wine shop.